Posts Tagged ‘employment’
Stupid ways to earn a living #4: top-flight footballer
November 19th, 2009 | 
Author: “He could turn on a sixpence” goes an old and remarkably unrealistic football-related maxim. A more contemporary interpretation would go something like “he could turn on fifty grand”.
It all but knocks me out cold that Ben Haim of financially struggling Portsmouth earned something in the region of the abovementioned figure to benchwarm at Manchester City with his Nike Pro+ sweats. Meanwhile, NHS nurses fight over bean sprouts.
Grovelling apology to our loyal fans
Three morose individuals mourn the loss of their hamster
To our loyal 5 fans: we’re sorry. We’ve been busy. But now we are back. With November starting, we shall start with our Mini NaNoWriMo updates. Thank you for still loving us. We love you too.
Except you in the corner.
Bottom line: working for a living, and why it sucks
The IWDTFM team during office hours
It will come as a shock to absolutely no one to find out that, every once in a while, when the moon is full and the leylines are aligned, I complain about my job.
This is not an uncommon occurrence. We spend a third of every day at work. Eight hours out of twenty-four. Apparently, the UK workforce is one of the hardest working populations in the world, putting in an average of £5,129-worth of overtime every year. I don’t really put in much extra time, although to my credit I’ve been known to stay late if something needs finishing. Most days, however, I’m out the office sometime between five-thirty and six o’clock with a spring in my step and my evening ahead of me.
So what do I complain about? The usual, really. Being tired, being busy, being bored, being hungry, wanting to go and play outside, wanting to stay and play inside. Wanting to be anywhere but cooped up in an office working for a living.
Stupid ways to earn a living #3: the fashion industry
Karl Lagerfeld: the definition of ego
We on the IWDTFM team are often asked, “Why don’t you all become models?”. It’s a valid question, given how good looking we all are. But I have a secret: I don’t understand the fashion industry. What it is, what it does, and why the hell anyone would want to be a part of it.
I’m writing this because I read Kate’s article about the New Zealand fashion week, and – like Kate – I was impressed that a country that has yet to pave its streets even has a fashion week. Wales doesn’t, although this could be due to the fact that large numbers of the Welsh population have yet to be introduced to clothes.
Not that the fashion industry is particularly concerned with clothes. They don’t produce things that you can wear. They produce monstrosities of design, much like a five-year-old with access to a large supply of Play-Doh might.
What really confuses me about the fashion industry is that so many people seem to want to break into it. Models, fashion designers, stylists, hairdressers… never mind that the industry seems to be a mix of sweat shops and the Third Reich, it’s honestly an industry that people marry footballers to get into. On your average thirteen-year-old girl’s list of “Things I Want To Be When I Grow Up”, the desirability of jobs in the fashion industry is probably only second to whatever the hell it is Tara Parker-Tomkinson did to get famous.
Further postal delays, still no-one cares
Industrial action, also known as avoiding work
Significant delays in sending letters and parcels to the UK through the Royal Mail are happening again. While only London staff are involved in industrial action this week, there is rising fear over a looming national strike, causing mild to negligible panic among aunties and luddites.
Members of the Communications Workers Union (CWU) will ballot tomorrow in between mid-day bowls of Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut about whether to escalate their action to a national walkout.
While the details of why they are striking or if they even understand the implications of their facetious and consistent industrial actions remain unclear, one thing is certain: no-one cares.
Tags: employment, i call bullshit, ignorance, media, money, morons, opinion, royal mail, strikes | 
2 Comments »
How to lose your job via Facebook
What a fool! (via Applicant.com)
Abbey Sherwell’s adventures in career trashing taught us all to be super careful while tapping out a quick wrathful tirade. Lately I’ve all been composing e-mails with the To and CC fields empty, just in case I absent mindedly leak some supressed fury into the message.
Abbey Sherwell and the art of offending online
Abbey Sherwell: not laughing now
You’ve got to feel a bit sorry for Abbey Sherwell.
On Friday, Kate tripped her way across the iwilldothatformoney office with a big excited smile on her face. You can always tell when Kate’s happy because she loses all sense of coordination. Once we’d picked her up off the floor and mopped the blood off her face, she told us to check our inboxes for – and I quote – “the most awesome email [she’s] ever read ever”. We then packed Kate into an airtight box and posted her to A&E.
The email was indeed awesome. It was incredibly funny in a “I can’t believe someone would be stupid enough to write this” sort of way. Even better, it had then been sent to exactly the wrong person, who had then forwarded it on to all his business contacts. And they’d forwarded it to their friends, who forwarded it again and within a day it was sat in Kate’s boyfriend’s inbox. That’s how we got it. That’s how the internet works these days.
So you’ve got to feel a bit sorry for Abbey Sherwell. She made a huge mistake – a proper schoolboy error – and now look what’s happened. She’s a budding internet meme.
How not to do business: a lesson by Abbey Sherwell
The following “oops I can’t believe somebody actually wrote and sent that” email arrived in my inbox today. I removed the addresses & contact details, and here it is for your enjoyment on a Friday. Read from the bottom up for a lesson hard learned on insulting customers!
So what do you think – should Abbey Sherwell be saved?
Postal delays expected, no-one cares
These people have no idea what they're picketing about
Another fecking strike has been announced, this time by the Communication Workers Union. The union has accused Royal Mail of cutting employees’ pay and reducing services.
“The current cuts, bullying managers and ever-increasing workloads on a shrinking workforce cannot continue”, said a spokesman for the union, from a barstool in a Wetherspoon’s at 11am. Apparently postal workers, like the postal service itself, hate change of any kind and refuse to move forward with the rest of the world.
Snail mail suffered a 25% decrease in usage over the last decade, in a market where more people are opting to purchase all kinds of goods online and have them delivered by Royal Mail. This spurning is hardly mysterious: waiting for a letter by post is shit, and there are numerous new ways to correspond which don’t warrant discussion here.
The postal workers are not the only layabouts disrupting the daily running of the country for mere coins. Train drivers, lorry drivers, baggage handlers and so on: if they feel like staying home all day to masturbate over Loose Women, we all have to tut and shake our heads at the injustice of a negotiation that ended with them getting a pay rise of only 1% above inflation.
